<p>In July 1992, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open" title="X/Open">X/Open</a> committee XoJIG was looking for a better encoding. Dave Prosser of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_System_Laboratories" title="Unix System Laboratories">Unix System Laboratories</a>
 submitted a proposal for one that had faster implementation 
characteristics and introduced the improvement that 7-bit ASCII 
characters would <i>only</i> represent themselves; all multibyte 
sequences would include only bytes where the high bit was set. This 
original proposal, FSS-UTF (File System Safe UCS Transformation Format),
 was similar in concept to UTF-8, but lacked the crucial property of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-synchronizing_code" title="Self-synchronizing code">self-synchronization</a>.
